You can’t keep your personal life separate from your work life
What matters is, breakups leave you broken, crippled and in nine out of ten cases, physically ill. It is a debilitating experience for many, and the worst part is, the pain seeps into every other area of your life, and feels starkly endless. As if this is how life is going to be forever. These are the times, where one not only has to create a safe space for themselves but also try hard so that they can use resources and tools to have a sense of control. For a lot of people, compartmentalization of emotions is not a possibility, and hence work life suffers terribly. Here are a few simple hacks!
If you can, apply for leave immediately
Of course, breakups may not come with fixed dates and schedules – around holidays or just before you’ve exhausted all your leave at work, but yes, certain times, you may be able to apply for leave. Why I am asking you to do this, is because you need to take out time. It is practically impossible for you to go through a breakup today and work efficiently in office tomorrow.
It is practically impossible for you to go through a breakup today and work efficiently in office tomorrow.
You obviously will feel something tugging at your heart and making you ill by the time afternoon arrives. Remember, we all need time to grieve and there’s no harm in doing that.
Close the phone-portal
It is a given thing that at work you will feel frustrated, confused and would regularly sneak into the bathroom to shed a tear or two. I had a friend who would take ‘howling breaks’ in office; he’d rush to the bathroom every hour, flip open his phone, look at his ex-girlfriend’s Facebook profile, and howl endlessly. It is a time-energy capsule that time and again makes you relive the trauma of your break up in a loop. And once that happens, there is no stopping. You would probably come back home with a splitting headache and gulp down a fistful of aspirin! And that needs to stop.
Switch to self-preservation instead of destruction
The most immediate after-effect of a breakup is an endless sense of remorse and sudden drop of their sense of self-worth. People also seek escape through food and sleep. Even at work they feel tired and exhausted and just want to leave and resort to lazy endless hours on the couch. Instead, I would suggest, understand that the left of your partner was never about how you are as a person, how you look and how charming you are as a personality. Hence redirect all your dissipating energy in eating healthy.
Make it a goal to exercise regularly and channel your energies into this project: where you are all set to transform yourself. Physical transformation does matter a lot. In the process, your mind also transforms as you see yourself in the mirror every day. So the immediate next pet project after a break should be your body without any delay.
Seek help
Slipping into a spiral is another thing that doesn’t allow anyone to perform well or that which creates an obstacle in every task they undertake. Thankfully, a lot of workplaces have a counselor or therapist. Go and speak to them. You may also feel that by ignoring your emotions and by avoiding them you can tackle them better. But focussing on what you feel and talking about these feelings would actually help gain perspective as to why this breakup happened to you. After the initial venting about your ex-partner, when the anger and feelings of vengeance begin to dissipate, you will begin to see yourself in a newer light. Understand that whatever happened to you is an opportunity as well, for knowing yourself better.
All this while you kept seeing and perceiving yourself through the eyes of your ex, wondering what went wrong. Speaking weekly to a professional or to a person who can have a third perspective will help you understand that it was never about them (in this case your ex), it was all about you. And it is through them now that you learn about yourself better. And once you feel yourself more in your own body than theirs, you can focus on your goals better and not make the mistake of weaving your world around them.
